Palestine and Palestinians: Guidebook, by the Alternative Tourism Group. Bayt Sahur: Alternative Tourism Group, 2005. 425 pages. Appendix to p. 436. Index to p. 444. $30.00 paper.
Reviewed by Ilan Pappé
It is difficult these days to think of Palestine as an ordinary tourist attraction. For those who choose to visit it as “Israel” and continue to deny the existence of Palestine or the Palestinians, it is indeed full of tourists’ resorts and sites of religious pilgrimages and of Jewish heritage. For some Europeans, whose charter flights take them directly to the Gulf of Aqaba, “Israel” is the city of Eilat on the way to the Sinai. However, ever since the outbreak of the first intifada, “political” or “ideological” tourists appeared. These people come with prior knowledge and with a desire to help, or at least to be informed. Even if they are not all hard-working volunteers in the International Solidarity Movement, they still are willing to invest time in listening to lectures, attending workshops, and even helping a bit while they are in Palestine or in Israel.
Until now, this group of tourists and visitors did not have any “tourist guide” to help them. The book under review is the ultimate guide for such a brand of committed tourist and activist. It would be wrong, however, to limit the definition of this book to a mere aide for the inquisitive tourist of modern day Palestine, for it breaks new ground in two very significant ways. First, it treats Palestine, from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean, as one subject matter for the visitors. It is through such a perspective that one can appreciate that Israel stretches over almost 80 percent of Palestine and that in 1948 al-Dawayma, today in the West Bank, and Tantura, today in Israel, suffered in a similar way from massacres carried out by Israeli forces.
Second, the book connects very smoothly and concisely the past and the present. It tells the tourist what can be seen and what could have been seen had it still been there. The present map and the erased map of Palestine are the contexts in which places are visited and discussed. Some illustrations in the guide, despite its compact format, give the readers a taste of this juxtaposition of a Palestinian past that was wiped out and a new Israeli reality that took its place.
The book’s first eighty pages are devoted to the land’s history, including its natural and cultural histories. It is based on the most updated analyses appearing in recent years. These debunk successfully the Zionist historiographical narrative. Thereafter, however, the orderly structure is lost, although this actually makes for a better text. Its value is that it reflects the admixture of emotions, impressions, and reactions one feels when one visits Israel and Palestine. Biographies of famous Palestinians, some of them assassinated by the Israelis during the second intifada, with the local history of a village are located next to famous poems, recommended cuisine and restaurants, and a guide to religious sites. This cacophonic display resonates with the uneasy coexistence between normalcy and abnormality in the land, people striving to lead an ordinary life under occupation or discrimination and against the bitter memories of the past; sometimes they succeed, sometimes they do not. The guide thus at times impresses upon the reader that what Palestine and the Palestinians have to offer is good food, beautiful locations, and intriguing cultural gems. But these attractions are accompanied by assassinations, house demolitions, checkpoints, roadblocks, and the exile from 1948 until the present.
The most telling example of this blend of joy and death, feast and catastrophe is on page 353 of the guide. At first it seemed to me to be a serious editorial fault. Opposite the story about the Tantura massacre in May 1948 there is a picture of a wedding. Like so many photographs in this guide, it has no caption. Initially, one could not think of a greater contrast than that between the massacre and the marriage ceremony. A closer look at the picture, however, shows a bride and a groom walking away from their loved ones, who remain behind a border crossing, separated by a group of UN observers. This could be a typical wedding scene in the occupied Golan Heights, where the Druze community was divided in 1967 by the Israeli occupation and where weddings cannot be attended by all those invited; worse, the couple has to choose which side of their families they must leave forever, as they opt whether to live on the Syrian side or in the occupied Israeli side of the Golan.
Apart from this disorganized and reflective presentation of Palestine and the Palestinians today, the guide also has practical information for anyone wishing to tour the country while being aware of the difficulties of movement in some areas and the relative accessibility of certain other destinations. For example, it has a very detailed and useful section on the current procedures in the Israeli airport—a site where, in my experience, a random policy of harassment can make a trip to Israel and Palestine a nightmarish experience. The good advice in this section could certainly ease the passage of those most likely to face harassment: Americans of Arab origin or Europeans who are likely to be treated by the Israeli authorities as potential peace activists, the worst crime in Israel today.
As someone who was born in Israel, I am especially appreciative of the direct and unequivocal language used throughout the book. There is no wish to hide things or to beautify them—this is a guide that wants Palestine to be transparent, and this is most needed now when this reality is totally distorted in the Western media. Right now, the land craves the tourists who would be the future ambassadors of its current misery and messengers of solidarity with the people who struggle to shrug off the occupation and its horrors. This guidebook is for them.
Ilan Pappé is senior lecturer in the political science department, Haifa University.